by Jim Miller
Newhouse is also critical of what he describes as a “blindly loyal Raider Nation” that defends Davis unthinkingly. Davis biographer Mark Ribowsky, on the other hand, has noted that Raiders fans are “perhaps the only people in the country who could separate him from the substance of the team” because they had not “sanctified Al Davis.” So how have fans reacted to the politics of football in Oakland and elsewhere? Clearly, a significant number of them in the East Bay and Los Angeles have rejected the team, but by no means all. Large numbers of Oakland fans traveled to games in L.A. and lots of L.A. fans now come up to Oakland, as shown by the early morning game-day shuttle flights packed with rowdy revelers clad in silver and black.30
Monte Poole, who covers the Raiders for the Oakland Tribune, told us that “as long as the team is a contender, the fans keep showing up. Not just locally, but nationally. Traveling with the team, I’ve grown accustomed to seeing Raiders fans filling hotel lobbies on the road, wherever the team happens to stay for the weekend. They come from far and wide.” Thus the Raiders’ moves have not killed their fan base in either town, nor had any negative effect on the hinterlands of Raider Nation from New York to Texas. They sell more merchandise than any other NFL club and draw huge crowds to road games. While Raiders fans may not have bankrupted themselves for personal seat licenses, they do sell out the big games, and the crowds are still the most frenetic in professional sports. The problem with attendance probably has more to do with the fact that, as Glenn Dickey observed of the new Oakland Raiders ticket prices, “The type of fan who used to come to Raiders games would be priced out of most seats.” Fans from the flatlands of Oakland or East L.A. might still loyally follow the team, but mostly on television supplemented with a live game or two a year.31
Reading Al
Many of us have been closet Raider fans for many years.... I always preferred the Raiders. They were rough, tough, rotten guys. The Niners were Mr. Clean—Bill Walsh was a rather God-like figure.... The Raiders were like the Grateful Dead.
Herb Caen, San Francisco Chronicle
Our research shows that Raider Nation is not monolithic in its response to Al Davis and the Raiders organization. Some are “blindly loyal” to Al Davis, while others look at him like the hated president of their beloved country. These two extremes, along with those sprinkled between the two poles, happily co-exist in the imagined community of Raider Nation. Just as love of country can push real existing class differences and conflicts of interest aside in the service of America, devotion to Raider Nation allows fans to transcend the harsh socio-economic reality of the fan–owner dynamic, although not always in the same way.
Most fans don’t blindly swallow the propaganda of their sports team’s ownership wholeheartedly.32 The fans who constitute the imagined community of Raider Nation aren’t totally free to choose the context that constructs their community’s meaning, but they are free to choose how to read various elements of the Raiders story. They are not mere dupes of a corporate plot to exploit them. Thus for most Raiders fans, Al Davis is not entirely synonymous with the Raiders, but rather part of the story that is the Raiders. The Davis myth means different things to different fans. Having worked hard to create his own myth, Davis has aided this process by ensuring his continued existence as a mysterious cipher into which fans can read a variety of meanings. Davis haunts the press box, brooding behind his oversized glasses, raising the hand bearing his Super Bowl ring to his mouth as if in prayer. Who knows what phantoms reside in the depths of his black-and-silver heart?
Davis is seen in a number of ways by Raiders fans. Some, like the webmaster at www.darthraider.com, defend Al wholeheartedly in the political arena as a loyal figure: The L.A. Coliseum Commission screwed Al Davis. He brought the team here with the promise of them fixing the area up, adding parking and putting in Luxury Suites. They never followed through on any of it so he took the team back to Oakland. He had a better offer from Baltimore, but loyally kept the team in California. Now we find out Oakland screwed him too. Al Davis gets a bad rap from most of the media just like us fans do. But, look at what he does for his former players. Almost all of them that were elected to the HOF [Hall of Fame] asked him to do their induction speech. And Marcus Allen, Al Michael and Pete Rozelle are not some of my favorite people.
Mike Rosacker is also a big Davis fan:The reason I became a psychotic Raider fan is because of Mr. Davis who I’m proud to have tattoos of him on both arms. I can’t exactly summarize over 15 years of research into this man in a few sentences. But bottom line, he’s done more for this league than anybody in this game. 99% of his players love him, and they are treated first class by Mr. Davis.
Darth and Mike, like the other Raiders fans who defend and identify with Davis see him as a battler, loyal to his allies, who wins against the odds and epitomizes the Raiders slogan “Commitment to Excellence.” Rather than feeling screwed by the Raiders owner, they side with him and see him as synonymous with the team.
Other fans identify with the antihero Al. As Dan Bartolomeo puts it, “I really like Al Davis, even when I think he’s dead wrong and lying through his teeth.” Fans like Dan are adherents of the “Just Win, Baby!” (no matter what) ethos. These fans see Davis warts and all and proclaim, “He’s a bastard but he’s our bastard.” What fans of this type recognize is that all owners are evil but at least our owner is interestingly evil. For the antihero crowd, many of the characteristics that Dave Newhouse bemoans are a badge of honor. The story of Davis bamboozling former co-owner Wayne Valley out of control of the team is seen not as a mark of shame by the antiheroes but as a badge of darkside honor. These Raiders fans are the ones who always rooted for the bad guy in the TV westerns. As Raiders fan Buck Allred puts it:Al Davis represents the maverick inherent in the collective American psyche. He is many things: pioneering, progressive, a vanguard, while at the same time he is a throwback, or, some would say, behind the times. His kindness and generosity to “his” people (former players, etc.) is well known, yet he is perhaps more often remembered for his heavy-handed tactics with those who would defy him. He blazes his own path; he walks to the beat of a different drum. And, to Al Davis, at the end of the day, it all comes down to just one thing: Just Win, Baby! What could be more American than that? Besides, when I was a kid, I always rooted for the cowboy with the black hat.
Yet another group of fans see Al as “Davis the progressive and integrator.” These fans rightly note that Al Davis let his renegade players dress and act how they wanted, ran a libertarian organization, was sympathetic to black players’ concerns in the sixties, and has made a series of barrier-breaking hires. Tom Flores was the first Mexican-American head coach, Art Shell the first black head coach, and Amy Trask the first female CEO in the National Football League. Raiders fan Eugene Jeffers enjoys the “swagger” and “take no prisoners attitude” along with the antihero fans, but he also says, “I like rooting for a team that has an owner that is colorblind, gender blind and rallies the organization around winning. I like the fact that down and out people get a second chance with the Raiders.” A large number of fans agree, forgiving Davis’s other transgressions for this virtue.
Then there is the “Football genius/courtroom cad” crowd. Aficionados of this stripe point to Davis’s undeniable mastery in turning the pathetic early sixties Raiders into the winningest team in professional sports. “He took castoffs and turned them into champions,” said Jim. “Nobody else could pick these guys up like he did again and again. It was like magic.” In the next breath, however, these fans dismiss Al’s legal maneuvers, “Now he’s too caught up in the endless legal stuff. He’s lost his touch.”
Other Raiders fans see Davis as “Shakedown Al.” Stephanie Sandlin recalls “being devastated when they went to L.A. It was one of the most heartbreaking things Al could’ve done to Oakland. That town loved that team. All for cash and greed.” Stephanie, along with many Bay Area fans, “lost interest in the ‘L.A. Raiders’” but she says the team’s return to Oakland “rekindled my passion.
” As for the Davis myth:Don’t get me wrong, I love the Raiders but I also hate certain things about them . . . The thing I am displeased most about is Al Davis’ tendency to litigate and never be happy with his lot. He is without a doubt one of the most storied men still running a franchise. He’s done great things for the game, the league and the Raiders. He also in the past has been vicious and has bitten the hand that feeds him. That annoys me. In the last 20 years if I were to venture an opinion I think Al has grown a little more eccentric (it sadly can happen to brilliant people) and has surrounded himself with “yes men.” This has prevented him from being kept in check and allowed the more negative aspects of his personality to come to the front.... With this trial that’s going on in Sacramento, Al trying to shakedown the Coliseum managers. The “promises” of sellouts. It’s crap. It’s like the White Star line saying the Titanic was unsinkable. They never did (it was a shipbuilding magazine that actually said that) but it made it into the story. Same with the Raiders.... It’s just Al going after more money. More notably, it’s not like the Raiders are an organization in the red anyway. Also, Al needs to take some of the blame because the first few years back did suck. Sucking does affect attendance. Al got a good home and old loving fans when he returned to Oakland. Now, that old feeling of unease is coming back. I worry he’ll pick up the Raiders and leave again. If he does that, I’m done with the team. It breaks my heart to say that. I truly do love them. I just can’t handle Al breaking my heart twice.
Gorilla Rilla gets lucky
David, another Raiders fan who has tired of Davis’s legal maneuvering, observes, “The Bay Area as a whole has had some trouble forgiving the Raiders for leaving Oakland.” His list of “a few items that would help ticket sales in Oakland” includes “1) Time; 2) Less legal battles between City/County/Raiders; 3) [Lower] ticket prices/PSL [Personal Seat License] fees. The economy has been in a slump for several years—especially hurting the Bay Area. Fans currently pay some of the highest prices in the league. The worst of this section is known as ‘Mt. Davis.’” David points out that Mt. Davis includes some of the worst seats in professional football priced “between $57 and $60 per [seat]!” Many of the other fans we interviewed agreed with this assessment, preferring to catch what David called a “pirate telecast” to being bilked for Mt. Davis privileges. As one Raiders fan put it, “Sell Mt. Davis tickets for 20 dollars a piece and you’ll get sellouts.”
Other fans’ problems with Al Davis go beyond ticket prices to his management style. Kerry Smith says, “I’m not particularly fond of Al Davis because I feel he interferes with the coaches’ responsibilities.” Stephen Dixon is a big fan, but not because of Al: “I love the Raider Mystique. I have had serious doubts about Al Davis’s competence over the years but have stuck with the team. I was very disappointed when [Raiders head coach] Gruden left as I felt he was finally a coach that could stand on his own without Al’s strong influence.” So what is there to be done? Stephen’s radical proposal won’t go over well in Raiders headquarters: “I still feel the franchise will be better off once Al Davis retires (or more like, passes on, as I don’t think he will ever relinquish power while he still has a breath left).”
There are even moments when the bonds that hold the imagined community together break and fans revolt against their oppressors in the Raiders hierarchy and the Oakland Football Marketing Association. Perhaps the most extreme wave of fan anger came when the team had just returned to Oakland from Los Angeles and, as the Los Angeles Times reported, fans who were “frustrated over expensive ‘personal seat licenses’ and the failure of the team to offer season-ticket holders coveted seats for the Dallas Cowboys game” went nuts and “brandished guns, threw chairs and threatened the staff.” Former ticket director Steve Ferguson remembers, “There was one incident in our office in which a fellow who was frustrated set a gun on the table and said to the customer service person, ‘Are you going to take care of my problem, or am I?’” The wave of Raiders rage, according to the Times, had “employees crying in their cubicles” because they were “beginning to take it personally.” In the end, crisis counselors and Pinkerton guards were brought in to deal with the emotional and martial needs of the staff. Although some of the ticket glitches have been worked out and such a wave of raw anger has yet to recur, getting the run-around from the ticket office is still a big fan complaint, though not big enough for most fans to secede from the nation.33
While some angry fans have rejected the Davis myth, other fans have resorted to irony. Part of this group sees Al as a fading eccentric who’s in a kind of nutty decline. The big hair and the oversized jumpsuits are key for these folks. “Is that really club soda he’s swilling up there in the press box?” asks one wag. Other fans of “Ironic Al” have invented their own narratives to explain the team’s seemingly endless legal adventures. As Raiders fan Gary Glasser of San Leandro puts it: “It is often said that Al Davis is the anti-Christ. I merely say that Al died many years ago in Los Angeles. Disneyland took the likeness of him and made him an ‘animatron.’ Like those you see at Disneyland. He really has been dead for years. I am sure the commissioners of the NFL, past and present, will argue that.”
A final subset of symptomatically postmodern Raiders boosters adopt Al’s business strategies with tongue firmly planted in cheek. Laughing at the absurdity of the “third move,” such fans discuss potential new homes in towns called Oakland across the United States or debate what truly constitutes “the Bay Area.” Does Stockton count? How about Portland? Other places where they have bays? New Jersey? Thus, rather than creating cognitive dissonance for fans measuring the chasm between their own interests and Davis’s interests, the existence of the Davis myth as a site of fan fancy, debate, and/or imaginative play actually helps strengthen the bonds that unite Raider Nation as an imagined community—everybody’s got an opinion about Al.
Class and Subculture
The Raider Nation is real . . . now you see other teams claiming nations, no one ever did before Raider Nation! We are globally represented and very well known for our love of our team. We are the Raider Nation and there is no other nation in any other sport or in any other team around the NFL . . . the Raider Nation stands alone!
Victor Cotto, Raiders fan
Raider Nation does not just allow fans to transcend the exploitation of fans and the inequality between fan and owner, it also unites fans across class, racial, gender, regional, generational, and cultural lines. When it comes to class, as has already been noted, Raider Nation has solid working-class roots. Its geographic home is Oakland, and the tough flatland neighborhoods of the city and its blue-collar suburbs supply more fans than the affluent hills. As San Francisco Chronicle reporter and Oakland resident Jim Zamora told us, “Perhaps the highest concentrations of hard-core fans can be found in the flatland neighborhoods along International Boulevard–East 14th Street starting just east of Lake Merritt all the way to the far reaches of Hayward, and along San Pablo Avenue from downtown Oakland through Berkeley, Albany, and Richmond to El Sobrante.” The perpetual poor stepsister to more fashionable, well-heeled San Francisco, the East Bay is more West Coast grit than California granola. Zamora observes, “These are parts of the Bay Area where pickup trucks outnumber SUVs and the team’s pirate symbol is ubiquitous.”34
The Raiders’ Los Angeles fan base has frequently been mischaracterized by writers like Al Davis biographer Mark Ribowsky, who saw the team’s move to “Hollywood” as a “forced mating of lunch pail and sushi” that traded its working-class fan base for “new fans from the rabid dens of Bel Air and Malibu.” Others like Glenn Dickey note that “the area around the Los Angeles Coliseum has deteriorated badly in recent years,” cite examples of fan violence, and claim that the Raiders “never developed a loyal constituency” in Los Angeles. Many others, including some Raiders fans hostile to Los Angeles or L.A. suburbanites afraid of the inner city, speak as if no one ever attended games in L.A. except for a gathering of some 50,000 Crips and Bloods. Al
l of these characterizations are wildly inaccurate.35
Just as Raiders fans in Northern California are dispersed throughout the Bay Area, fans were and are widely dispersed throughout Los Angeles and Southern California. There are booster clubs in Los Angeles, South Gate, Torrance, Hawthorne, Carson, Covina, Highland, Anaheim, Orange, Canoga Park, the Eastside, and parts farther east and south. They range from the suburban San Fernando Valley in the north to suburban Orange County in the south and include the Eastside Raider Nation and clubs in the gritty industrial areas of the city. The area around the Los Angeles Coliseum is part of what the premier scholar of Los Angeles, Mike Davis, has called, “a vast city within a city” where the “browning of Los Angeles’s industrial working class” has taken place. It is this part of the Raiders’ L.A. fan base that came to associate the team’s colors with street toughness. While some L.A. gangs did adopt the team’s pirate logo and occasionally showed up at games, the assertion that gangs totally define the L.A. portion of Raider Nation is the product of fearful suburban imaginations. Much like Raider Nation in Oakland, Raider Nation in L.A. is a tough multi-ethnic blue-collar fan base, but it is not just a large extension of the street gangs.36
It is worth noting briefly here that there is a small subgroup within Raider Nation that has come to associate the team’s “outlaw” image with literal outlaw behavior. Interestingly, the most notorious acts of Raiders fan violence were not committed by members of the Oakland chapter of the Hells Angels or L.A.’s East 14th Street Gang, but by regular fans who “overidentified” with the cut-throat image, perhaps as a way of compensating for powerlessness in other areas of their lives. The Raider Bandit was a bank guard from Sacramento, the Raiders nut who savagely beat a Steelers fan into a coma in Los Angeles was a white kid from the L.A. suburb of Augora, and the Silver and Black rooter who stabbed a Chargers fan in the stands in San Diego was a mechanic from Norwalk. This subgroup is a miniscule percentage of the overall fan base, and many Raiders adherents dismiss them as “not real fans.” Raiders fan Terry Gartner’s thoughts on the matter are representative of this view: “As for the fans . . . I’m afraid to say that there is an element of behavior that has attached itself to the Raiders and their games. Unfortunate, but true. And that, for the lack of a better word, gang mentality has given all Raiders fans a bad name.” A distanced observer might also note the presence of violence and other forms of extreme behavior across the spectrum and see that other NFL fans brawl and break the law as well. Indeed, a serious comparison study of Raiders fans and British soccer hooligans would find Raiders boosters to be pussycats.